Making the Case for Network Automation

Success in today’s highly competitive business environment is not determined by an organization’s size or characterized by “the big beating the small”—these days, it’s a matter of the fast beating the slow. In other words, success is now predicated on your ability to rapidly develop and deliver new applications to market, accelerate IT service delivery, and add more value to the business more quickly—all while enabling more effective security and reducing overall costs. So, how do you create and deliver all these competitive advantages for your organization? In a word: automation. Specifically, automation enabled by the virtualization of your network—which can deliver the same types of benefits that many organizations realized upon virtualizing their compute and storage resources. Unfortunately, of the three pillars that compose the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)—compute, storage, and network—the network pillar is typically the last one to be virtualized, thus inhibiting the automation of manual IT processes. In turn, this lack of automation gives rise to a number of self-imposed barriers preventing modern enterprises from achieving the agility and speed required to compete in today’s marketplace.